


The Tale of Wolf

by delcatty_got_your_tongue



Category: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (Video Game)
Genre: Blood and Injury, Canon Compliant Violence, Eventual Genikiro ending, Ghosts, Immortal Severance Ending (Sekiro), Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-14
Updated: 2021-01-14
Packaged: 2021-03-18 17:33:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28746996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/delcatty_got_your_tongue/pseuds/delcatty_got_your_tongue
Summary: Once, there was a shinobi who failed in his duty.Wolf returns to the Hirata estate ablaze, to news that the entire clan has been slaughtered by bandits. Wolf returns to whispers that the Great Shinobi Owl is dead. He can find no word about his lord, only knows that as he cannot die, and so must be alive somewhere.Alternate summary: Wolf's life, and those around him, as fairy tales.This follows the events of the game, and then diverges from the Severance ending.
Relationships: Genichiro Ashina/Sekiro | Wolf
Comments: 5
Kudos: 26





	The Tale of Wolf

**Author's Note:**

> C/W: There is a small non-con scene with implied rape. 
> 
> This is me showing my age, but more than a decade ago my first real fandom was Inuyasha, and Resmiranda was my queen, and I always wanted to be able to write like her. 
> 
> Inyuasha is an anime set in feudal Japan as well, and was my first introduction to Japanese folklore and history. Resmiranda played on fairytales and folklore in her fics and even though it has been years since I have read them (including her masterpiece Tales from the House of the Moon), that fic was, I believe, my first real introduction (fairytale revisionists like Gaiman and Kaori Yuki came later) to how fact is warped into story, how stories do not talk about the gore and death and PTSD of epic battles, but how important the story is anyway.

Once, there was a nameless boy who had nothing but stories to hold.

His mother had told him stories. He doesn't remember anything else about her, not her face, or even the sound of her voice, but he still remembers the stories, has recited them silently while his father left him in Usui forest with nothing more than a sword and a handful of rice, remembers them when he lies shivering in his corner and tries to forget the bruises that line his back. 

The ones he had liked best were about the heroes. There is one about the boy raised by a mountain witch, who came down and wrestled his enemies with his great strength. Brave samurai who defend their lords to their dying breath. The noble lords who rage against tyrants, hold uprisings for their own people.

There were the ones about the demons and ghosts. A demon emerging from the battlefields - all bathed in red, burning with fire. Stories about ghostly women who haunted the land, looking for the ones who wronged them, who had no qualms spiriting away little boys. Those were the ones meant to scare him into coming back home on time. They worked. He had been a timid child, growing up.

Wolf stopped being scared, the day he loses everything.

His father was long gone, conscripted in a war he could barely understand at the time. The women were the ones who worked the fields, them and the men too-young or too-old or too-weak to hold a spear. The battle, his mother had told him, were taking place somewhere far away, which was why he couldn't see his father.

And then one day, she was wrong.

Death spilt out like a river that day. It hadn't mattered who or if they were from an army or not - everyone was killed with a flurry of arrows and sharp steel. The last thing Wolf's mother had done was tuck his father's scarf around his neck, buried her son amongst the bodies that had piled up, and told him not to make a sound.

He doesn't know how long he hides there for but emerges when he finally hears the shouting stop. _Fields of bodies, mountains of dead_ , the song had went. He wanders it, looking for his mother's face amongst the corpses, picks through the wrecked homes for food stores. He knows already that she is dead, had known when she was pulled away from him with a scream. There is no room in this world for timid boys.

He never finds her body.

What he finds instead, is that human bodies stink. He comes across the battlefield just a few hundred shaku from his village. It smells like freshly fertilised farmland, not just blood but piss and shit from where the soldiers were stabbed in the guts, where they had all loosed themselves before they died. And this is before the bodies began to bloat.

He takes any swords he can find. Slings them across his back from a sling made from a dead man's clothes. Steel is always valuable, can be reforged into hoes if the war ends, or be used again if it is not over. Around him, he sees other gaunt men doing the same. He slinks from their sight, keeps away.

The sun sets, the crows land and peck at the bodies, and everything stinks but his hunger is sharp enough now that it has broken through the dried gore of his hands, the stink of the dead.

He keeps expecting to come across a demon. What he finds instead, is something quite different.

He is on his knees unfastening a sword from under a corpse - already a mob had come and fleeced most of the corpses and he only has scant leavings - when the blade cut through the side of his face, so sharp that he bleeds before he realises the weapon sliding through the skin. He looks up to see a great sword bigger than the ones he is carrying, and the man holding it is bigger than them all.

"What's the matter, stray? Nothing left to lose?"

He does the only thing that makes sense. He grasps the end of the sword and looks the man in the eye. Either the man will kill him, or he will not. The sword bites through the skin of his hands and his blood waters the ground.

"Fascinating," the man says, even though he does not understand what is so fascinating at all. "Will you join me, starving wolf?"

Once, there was a boy who trained to be a shinobi. Once, a boy who had listened intently to his mother's stories was left behind in a battlefield, as so many were.

The man, who is named Usui Ukonzaemon, who has titled himself The Great Shinobi, who is known as Owl, names the boy he picks up from the field Wolf and tells him to call him father. Father never told Wolf stories. Owl only spoke to give orders, or give lectures on obedience.

More often than not, he did this with a blade. 

Lady Butterfly never told Wolf stories. She would only speak of past heroes and history, teaches him the intricacies of the Ashina clan and its many vassals. "Not so many now," she says, hacking her cough-like laugh. "Not after all these battles." She is kinder than Owl, but barely.

"If an illusion occurs," Lady Butterfly says, pressing something into his palms before his father leads him into Usui Forest, "it is because someone created them. Find its creator, and you will return to reality." There is a story here, one written in the way she caresses her kunai, how she easily summons golden butterflies.

"What if I can't find its creator?" he asks because he has long learnt not to ask for stories. The forest is teeming with them, and mists, and ghosts. Illusions can be cut down, even without the same salt and prayers and blessings as ghosts. The problem is that one can forget what is real. Illusions can hurt one, if one believed in them enough.

"You make a sound," she says, and claps her hands together loudly to demonstrate. "Loud and sharp enough, and it will dispel the illusion. The snap seeds will help, but it will not be enough."

Usui forest is so thick with trees that it is almost as dark as it is in the day as it is at night. Usui forest is so thick with mist that even his night eyes are next to useless. He learns to navigate by sound, by scent.

In the forest, he chews every grain carefully to make it last. Hunts for roots and herbs that he recognises. He had hoped to find rabbits or some other game but the forest is strangely devoid of animals.

He hears people speaking in the fog. His father, asking him where he is, with threats of beatings and worse if he will not show himself. Lady Butterfly, telling him he needs to go home. A woman, who might have been his mother, calling him by a name long forgotten. He ignores every one of them and stays in the trees. Claps his hands when it all becomes too much, waits for the ringing and the voices to stop.

He finds the source of the illusions deep in the forest, an old man who can barely lift his rusted blade, who looks as though he spends all his time caring for the meagre crops on his meagre farm.

"Please," he says. "Owl told me that I could live here in peace as long as I followed his orders. I have kept intruders out. I have made the illusions he asked of me, all these years."

Wolf brings his blade down. There is no hesitation.

When he emerges from the forest a week after he walked in, weak and shaking but alive, his father declares his shinobi training finished.

"It is time you served a master," his father says. "But do not forget the first rule of the Code."

Once, a baby was born during a storm in the middle of the night, when there was no rain but only lightning blanketing the sky. Once, there was a boy whose skin would not break, whose body would not bleed. Once, there was a boy was said to be a gift from the gods. When stories of his divine existence made their way to the faraway castles, the lords came with their horses and all their finery and took him from his peasant family, like gods spiriting away a child to live away from life's drudgeries.

Once, a boy was entrusted into the care of a shinobi.

Lord Kuro is the first child Wolf has spent any significant amount of time with, since he was named Wolf. Lord Kuro is an existence apart from the other children he once played with.

The boy is soft and quiet and has few demands. He is polite to his adopted family, kind towards the servants. His speech is always formal, as though he had been noble born and bred. He trains in the Hirata dojo as required, obediently but without any kind of enthusiasm. No one shouts at him or beats him for not having skill with the blade. Why would he need to he proficient, after all, since he has such a devoted shinobi? And even if he were taken, who could hurt a child who cannot be cut by the sharpest blades?

The only trouble he gives is when he insists on reading past his bedtime. Wolf relents, most of the time. His lord asks for so little, after all.

Then one day, his father calls him away. Wolf obeys the Code, and leaves his master.

Once, there was a shinobi who failed in his duty.

Wolf returns to the Hirata estate ablaze, to news that the entire clan has been slaughtered by bandits.

Wolf returns to whispers that the Great Shinobi Owl is dead.

He can find no word about his lord, only knows that as he cannot die, and so must be alive somewhere.

Wolf moves doggedly, loyally, as he always has. He tracks down the bandits that attacked Hirata estate but finds that someone has killed them all already. He finds what he thinks are the blackened remains of Lady Butterfly's corpse still clutching her kunai, and wishes he had asked her about her stories.

And finally, he leaves the estate that he has lived in for years and wanders the land hunting for news.

Weeks go by, then months, then years, and still, no one has heard of a little boy with too-old eyes and a soft smile, who insists on reading past his bedtime.

Wolf forgets to eat, to sleep as he tracks down whispers. Only realises how much he has misplaced his self, when he attempts to draw the pilfered blade he has picked up from a battlefield - he misses Kusabimaru like he does a limb, wonders if it had melted down in the Hirata estate like so many other things - and found himself too-slow. He cuts down the bandits all the same, but it takes him weeks to recover from his injuries.

Then Wolf hears of the boy kept in the Ashina castle.

He circles the estate for weeks. But the Ashina clan have an army patrolling its entire estate, and shinobi running around their rooftops. He looks for weaknesses, blind spots, and then stumbles across a company of soldiers.

He loses, and quickly. The men laugh at how easily he is caught and whisper about his weakness as he bleeds out in the dirt. 

"Do we kill him, then?"

Their leader, the biggest yes, but also the one with the meanest laugh, bellows. "No," he says. "How about we break him in?"

When they are done, they throw him down a well.

Wolf does not know how long he lies there for. Drifts in and out of his sleep, and hears Owl and Lady Butterfly calling his name, of the men and their jeers. Imagines their blades cutting through his skin. The pain of it is almost a comfort.

Then the letter arrives, and Wolf wakes again to find his Lord. He does.

And then he loses him again.

Once, a lord and a shinobi battled under a full moon.

Lord Genichiro, Wolf thinks, is everything he is not. The daimyo is tall and broad, possesses a strength that Wolf will never have. He is quick as well, his sword moving almost as though he is dancing.

Wolf is weakened from hunger. Has only had a swig of gourd water to quench his thirst. His body still aches from his last battle and hurts in all the places the men had touched after.

He never stood a chance, he thinks, as he watches the arc of his arm in the air, blood trailing after it and pattering in the soil like rain.

The third rule of the Iron Code: There is no shame in losing one battle, but you must take revenge by any means necessary. Wolf should be thinking of this as Genichiro's sword slices through his body.

Instead, he is watching the frown on his enemy's face, the way his large body moves as swiftly and silently as a shinobi.

 _Oh_ , he thinks as he collapses, and for the first time in years, since he was a boy in a field reaching for a rice ball, he feels himself _want_.

It is a pity that he will have to kill him, he thinks, before he passes out.

Once, there was a shinobi who was born again.

Wolf wakes to a new limb, a ragged old man chipping away at wood by candlelight.

"It looks like death is not your fate just yet," he says. It is not, this time, or the next, or the next.

Wolf learns to come back gasping and choking and each time on mud, on dirt, on his own blood. He always comes back. 

He brings his blade down on soldiers, peasants who had been conscripted into the Ashina's army, men who are more comfortable with a hoe than a katana. He cuts down a general. He guts open another. He sets an ogre aflame.

Wolf raids the soldiers' petty food stores, forces his body to remember how to move again as it learns how his new limb moves. He returns to the sculptor, who shows him how to clean and maintain the arm. He practices against the undying man in the temple grounds. He meditates before the smiling Buddha with the bell, and comes out of his visions with more questions than answers.

Slowly, Wolf returns to himself. He presses onward and reaches the Ashina castle gates.

"Forgive me," he says as he buries his blade in Gyoubu's throat. The man had only been doing his duty. All of them were.

"Have you ever wondered," the old servant woman tells him after. "Where does all that hatred go?" Her eyes are dark and bitter. He wonders what she has lost in all her long years. 

But Wolf has no time for hatred. Only duty, and his lord. He continues to carve his path forward. It runs bloody, knee-deep with bodies.

Once, there was a peasant lord who sought power to protect his lands.

Wolf has already driven his sword into Genichiro twice, and still, Genichiro stands. "Will you not serve another master, shinobi of the Divine Heir?"

Wolf hesitates and knows Genichiro sees him hesitate. "Heresy," he says aloud, grips Kusabimaru's hilt tight, as though it will make up for his own small treacheries.

"Heresy?" Genichiro repeats and to Wolf's horror, begins to strip himself. Had his desire been so nakedly obvious in his face?

Genichiro stands with his chest stripped bare, his hands and arms blackened as though painted with ash. He raises his sword as lightning cracks the sky open. "If it is for the sake of preserving Ashina, I will seize any manner of heretical strength. Behold," he says, and Wolf cannot take his eyes off the lord. "The Lightning of Tomoe."

_Have you ever wondered where does all that hatred go?_

Wolf battles with precision, with strength. Wolf has lost his arm to this man. The Code dictates that he must kill Genichiro, even if the daimyo did not have his master. Genichiro has decided that Wolf stands in his way. They are enemies to the death. There is no question. And yet -

 _I do not want this,_ Wolf thinks, as he stomps down hard on Genichiro's sword.

 _No_ , Genichiro's sword responds as it clashes down heavy on Kusabimaru. _And yet, here we are_.

Genichiro sends lightning at him. Wolf falls to his knees, takes a blow that shakes him to his bones. He rolls aside, takes a swig of water, feels his skin knit back together.

Genichiro sends lightning at him again. This time, he points it back. Wolf feels Genichiro's heart stop as he drives his sword into his body a third time.

Then Genichiro rises again, body stiff, the way a corpse would be. Genichiro removes a shaking hand from his face, and Wolf sees that his eyes are all red.

"This land is everything to me," he says, shaking as he struggles to his feet. "For her sake, I will shed humanity itself."

"Resurrection," Wolf says, the word slipping from his lips like a curse, even though a small treacherous part of him leaps with relief. He tightens his grip on his sword again. Genichiro is _alive_ again. There is an animal, wild, howling in his chest.

And yet, Genichiro does not move to fight him, only stumbles toward the banister. "So long," Genichiro says, and Wolf has a desperate, manic urge to tell him his name.

Genichiro flings himself off the roof.

It is a long way down. Wolf could reach for him, if he wanted.

He turns away. He has failed his master already once before. Hesitation will only mean failure again.

Once, there was a shinobi who fought the tides of heaven, no matter how hard they tried to drown him.

Wolf breaks the Iron Code, and instead of spiriting Kuro away from Ashina and to safety, agrees to aid him in his quest to sever the Dragon Heritage. It is like he is a hero on a quest - to sever the dragon's heritage, one needs the tears from a dragon. To obtain the tears from a dragon, one must perform a ritual to ascend to the Fountainhead Palace, and for the ritual to work, one needs a stone, a flower, and a sword, and one must best the guardians of each item to obtain them. His story - because now that he has the Divine Heir's blood running through his veins, he supposes he _is_ a story now - only becomes stranger the deeper he goes into Ashina's depths to fulfill his master's wishes.

An ape that rises again after its head is severed.

Headless ghosts, who stumble around still in their bloating bodies, spilling fog and terror from their pale skin.

A village of people who will not die. The village priest, shut away and splashing away at sake.

Deep in Ashina's depths, he finds a woman in a bloodstained kimono with a straw basket on her head, weeping as she plucks her shamisen, and he suddenly thinks of his mother.

 _Fear,_ he thinks, _is absolute._ He will not let it overwhelm him.

He dies, and he comes back. He dies, and he raises his blade again.

There is something rotting in Ashina, he thinks as he moves deeper into the mountains, falls into its depths. He had never realised it before but now that he has seen it, he cannot close his eyes to it again. Something more than the ghosts that linger in battlefields. He sees it in the centipedes that wriggle and crawl from the Senpou temple monks' necks. In the way the Mibu villagers crawl their way to him no matter how many time he cuts them down. In Hanbei's broken, lifeless eyes.

Again and again, he thinks of Genichiro, the way he had gotten back up on his feet, his eyes all red.

Mount Kongo is beautiful, with its leaves all aflame. Mount Kongo has Jizo statues and pinwheels turning with every corner he looks, as haunted as any battlefield. The Divine Child of the Rejuvenating Waters looks at him, with ghosts flitting past her face.

 _The Dragon Heritage is a curse,_ Kuro had said with his old eyes. _We must sever the ties of immortality._

 _No, Lord Kuro_ , he thinks. _I am afraid it is something far worse than that._

Even without the Dragon Heritage, the search for immortality will never stop. A pinwheel, ever turning in the breeze.

Isshin had fought for his land so that they could worship the waters in peace. Hold the Dragonspring Pilgrimages like the elderly remembers doing when they were children. Wolf has never been one for politics or patriotism or ideology - the life of a serf is an easy one, after all, he only had to do what his father and master said. And now, he wonders if Isshin was wrong. Perhaps the old ways are better left forgotten, or at the very least, feared.

He thinks of Genichiro's blackened fingers, how the lord had reached out as though hoping to grasp Ashina, and wonders what it is Genichiro is trying to hold onto.

In his dreams, Genichiro taps taps taps against the door with blackened fingers, leaving soot on everything he touches. _Will you not serve another master?_ he asks in a ragged voice. Wolf holds the door, prays for the strength to not let him in.

Wolf faces his father. Wolf kills his father.

 _We are not so different, you and I,_ Genichiro whispers in Wolf's head. _We do what must be done_.

Wolf ascends to the heavens and realises that here too, it is rotten inside out, even if it all perfumed sweetly with flowers. The false nobles seem to only spend their days playing flutes and tending to carps. The Okami women warriors remind him of Genichiro.

He grits his teeth and drives his sword in. He keeps carving his path forward.

Wolf finds the Divine Dragon and carves its eyes open. He collects the tear.

He comes back to the mortal realm to find the world aflame.

Once, there was a shinobi who returned too late.

Wolf ties his scarf around the wound on Genichiro's neck.

"Wake up," Wolf says - orders - _begs_ \- over and over and over as he chews on pellets, presses their paste down Genichiro's mouth, washes it down with gourd water. " _Wake up._ " Genichiro is a hero in a story. Genichiro has to come back to fight him again.

Ashina is burning. Kuro is dead. Wolf has nothing now - no father, no master. He had heard the sculptor's voice, distorted and cracked but still recognisably _his_ , when he slew the demon. Emma - who knows where Emma is. Somewhere safe, he hopes.

There is a moment when Genichiro's heart stops, and Wolf thinks - _No._ Then his blood begins to spill again, pushed out by his beating heart. His skin begins to knit under his fingers.

Genichiro is alive, he thinks blindly. Alive. Good.

He heaves the large body over his shoulders and slowly makes his way to the temple, even more of a hovel than before. The sculptor had cleared a path through the Ashina outskirts, filled it with men dead and dying. The flames are already turning to ash.

It is dawn when Genichiro shudders awake. Blinks and stares at his surroundings.

"Shinobi of the Divine Heir," he says, voice cracked and broken.

"Wolf," he answers. "My name is Wolf."

Genichiro blinks up at him, and truly looks as though he has just crawled from the underworld itself.

"Did it work?" he asks.

Wolf shakes his head, watches Genichiro's face tighten with fury.

"You have taken everything from me," Genichiro croaks. Looks as though he would spit in his face, if he only had the strength to do so.

"And yet, I am left with nothing." Wolf flexes the fingers of his prosthetic out of reflex, sees the way Genichiro watches the movement. Wary, they are always wary with each other. "Lord Kuro has passed, as he wished. Lord Isshin has returned to the underworld, as he wanted. The sculptor, who became a demon, is also dead."

Genichiro sneers. "Then why am I not rotting with the rest of them, shinobi?" He eyes the Mortal Blade strapped onto Wolf's back. "Finish it."

"Because," Wolf says slowly, carefully, aware that whatever he says will affect how Genichiro will see him from here on. "You do not have to be."

Confusion flashes across Genichiro's face, and then it shutters again. "What are you saying, shinobi?" 

"You once asked if I would serve another master," Wolf says. "I could not, then. But my duty to Lord Kuro has ended."

"You mean," Genichiro sneers. "After you killed him."

"He wished to be released from the Divine Heritage," Wolf says steadily, not rising to the bait. "And, I believe, Lord Genichiro, you were the one who stabbed him first."

Genichiro at least has the grace to blink and look away. "He should have accepted me into his oath," he mutters furiously.

"Nevertheless," Wolf says. "The Divine Heir is dead, and the Dragon Heritage has been severed. As my lord had wished."

"You want to serve me?" Genichiro spits, shaking from fury, from his injuries. "Take Ashina back from the Ministry for me."

Wolf bows, had already expected that answer. It is odd though, how much he had hoped for otherwise. "I will try, my lord, or die trying."

He stands, already running a mental check on the inventory in the temple. There is food and water, and enough of Emma's medicine that Genichiro will be comfortable for a while. He wonders how long it will take before he falls. He knows that this time, he will not come back.

It is not a bad thing, he thinks. It is no hardship for him to die while carrying out his master's orders, as impossible as they may be. He cannot help but think, how strange it is, that it is easier to ascend to the Fountainhead Palace than it is to battle humans yet again.

He cannot help but think of all the things he wishes he could say to Genichiro.

_I am sorry, that we have always had to stand against each other. I wish I could have served you then, as my lord._

"Wait," Genichiro says.

Wolf turns, sees how Genichiro looks at him with his eyes glowing red.

"My lord?" he asks, and he doesn't miss the way Genichiro's lips twist and part.

"Do not go," he says quietly.

"My lord?"

"I do not want your services, shinobi of the Divine Heir." Genichiro says this slowly, mouth thick, as though he is trying to say something else.

Wolf looks to him and opens the door. "That is not who I am," he says. "But I am yours, if you will have me."

Genichiro makes a strangled sound and reaches out. Wolf does not hesitate when he reaches back.

Once, a man was presented with a choice, to continue to serve others or to live for himself, and he found it the most frightening thing of all.

When they cross the mountains of Ashina, Genichiro makes a small sound, as though he can feel where its boundaries end. He clings harder to Wolf that night and Wolf says nothing, only strokes his hand through the fallen lord's hair. 

"Once," he says, softly. "There was a nameless boy with nothing but stories to hold."

Genichiro stills, and Wolf tells him stories throughout the night.

Once, there was a daimyo who had lost his lands, and yet gained something in turn.

"The beds at this inn," Genichiro complains. "Are worse than the army cots."

Wolf covers his mouth with a hand. "Is that so, my lord."

Genichiro swats at him irritably. "Stop calling me that."

"If you say so, my lord." 

Genichiro grumbles, as he always does, and yet he still stays. Wolf never stops marvelling at that. "Do you have the details of our catch for today?"

"Yes." Wolf had spoken to the couple who own the inn earlier and asked about the disappearances in the wayside. He'd woken early, shook awake from his nightmare and watched Genichiro’s chest move until he heard the innkeepers wake.

The world, he thinks, is changing. The roads are larger, and there are more travellers despite the bandits and soldiers and demons that roam the lands. Perhaps one day, there will be peace, and there will no longer be a need for shinobi.

Until then, two trained swordsmen are always useful, especially those used to killing demons.

"Sometimes," Wolf says, then stops himself, hesitant to share something so inane. Genichiro is watching him as he picks at his fish, intent, even if he will never admit it aloud. "Sometimes I dream that we are fighting again at the top of Ashina castle. In my dream, you are always angry at me."

"Do I win?" Genichiro asks, the quirk of his mouth almost imperceptible.

Wolf reaches out to press a kiss to his thin lips, blinks away the memory of Genichiro bringing down his sword on him. "Sometimes."

**Author's Note:**

> Tell me nice things about my writing please thank you
> 
> You can find me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/natziwang) posting about more fandom-related things
> 
> Many thanks to the Genikiro discord server for being such champions as I shared small snippets.
> 
> Writing fantasy, it seems, is the best way to not write about #Adulting. My writing style here is so different from the way I've done my Pokemon and Haikyuu fics and I think a lot of it is because how beautiful the game is, it's almost effortless. The sheer amount of symbolism that is built into the environment - Mt Kongo breaks me, really - but of course the sakura and wisteria blossoms in Fountainhead Palace, the seals plastered all over the Dilapidated Temple, the item descriptions for Gachiin's Spiritfall I just love this game so much.


End file.
